PALLAS
introduction , p. 11
A
peter angermann , p. 21
A superb painter of our times
B
hubert bari , p. 30
A brilliant pioneer of telling stories with objects
john berger , p. 38
A sorry tale of the suppression of realist painting
edward bersudsky , p. 53
A refusenik Russian genius
david bowie , p. 70
An opportunity missed
C
henri cartier - bresson , p. 73
The great photographer takes up drawing
jacques chirac , p. 80
Outreach and mad cow disease
hugh collins , p. 83
A close brush with a murderer
beryl cook , p. 86
A blooming original
art exposed
D
salvador dalí , p. 95
Religious art in our times and Princess Anne francis davison , p. 113
A hidden genius and the unlikely inspirer of Damien Hirst
marcel duchamp, p. 124
A rogue exposed F
ian hamilton finlay , p. 138
A Don Quixote on the hillside
H
martin handford , p. 144
A drawing before Where’s Wally?
david hockney , p. 150
A trip in a balloon ending in … J
jack jones , p. 163
Saving Labour history
L
pat lally , p. 169
The birth of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art
art exposed
l . s . lowry , p. 193
Amazing remains and a theft with a happy ending
M neil macgregor , p. 206
A clandestine decision
euan mackie , p. 219
A discovery that could change the history of Europe
charles rennie mackintosh , p. 226
A tragic Scottish missed opportunity
david measures , p. 239
A hymn to disappearing nature
P
pablo picasso , p. 248
An ongoing, vital inspiration
Q
the queen , p. 255
A very witty person
R
john ruskin , p. 270
His vision for Sheffield restored
art exposed
Sniki de saint phalle , p. 287
A great visionary, the avant-garde artillery of feminism
sir nicholas serota , p. 294
Wrong, and stayed too long
brian sewell , p. 310
An independent voice who got up people’s noses
paddy japaljarri sims , p. 314
Sustaining 40,000 years of abstraction
sir roy strong , p. 322
A battle, over a wee dram, about charging
Traymond tallis , p. 327
The eminent doctor cracks the problem of what art is today
hock aun teh , p. 333
Chinese Mad Grass calligraphy meets modern art
mrs thatcher , p. 342
A snappy thinker shows her ignorance
jean tinguely , p. 349
The greatest artist of our time
Wpaul waplington , p. 364
Art for the people and by the people lives
list of illustrations p. 370
index p. 373
For my son DANIEL, & for IRENE for so enhancing my life
Percy Horton, Unemployed Man, c. 1929
John Nicoll, a man of powerful build with a strangely quiet presence, suggested I write this book. He was the longterm director of Yale University Press, then director of his late wife’s company Frances Lincoln Ltd, after which he retired, got bored and started publishing again under the mast of Wilmington Square Books. He came to see me in Edinburgh, though we’d never previously met, found out what I was writing and, to my surprise and delight, published Realisation—from Seeing to Understanding and a book I was working on with Raymond Tallis, Summers of Discontent: the Purpose of the Arts Today. On a visit to his home, through an odd serendipity, I knew something personal about most of the artists represented on his walls. He suggested I should write a professional memoir—an idea that had never occurred to me. But he added, ‘Don’t mention your girlfriends— no one is interested in them.’ I never got round to writing it while I was working with him, but when I did, I took his advice.
I don’t think I would ever have written it at all without the insistent persistence of my old friend and colleague, David Phillips, former keeper of art at Nottingham Castle, whose eyes, the rapiers of his ferocious wit, belie his size. He’d heard many of my stories and was convinced that I should write them down. Conferences of curators often end in discussing labels, because that’s their most direct interface with their public. David became briefly famous throughout the profession for pinning ridiculously large labels to
his gallery walls, printed in black ink on luminous pink, telling his visitors, in effect, to ‘read, you bastards, read!’
David was particularly keen that I keep my text amiable throughout as, rather to my surprise, he said I was, myself, most of the time. ‘No one is interested in your old battles any more,’ he told me. I would like to hope that this isn’t the case, but I am aware that few things are more boring than an old curmudgeon going on and on, and the last thing I want to do is bore. Many things have improved in museums over my time: educational work, hugely, and museum labels, which used to be full of technical data that made visitors feel even more ignorant and excluded, but which now help people understand what they are looking at, and why.
But there are two particular battles that I fought and, regretfully, lost during my career, which I must mention here because they still concern me deeply. The first I promise never to mention again. This is the issue of light levels. Museums, especially art museums, need to be hymns to sight, but instead they’ve become some of the most dismal places on the planet.
The problem began in 1978 when Garry Thomson, the conservation scientist at the National Gallery, an elegant and amiable man, published his seminal book, The Museum Environment. This soon became a gospel for our profession, admirable in every respect but one. The book recommended that no light-sensitive object should be exhibited at levels higher than 50 lux, and no object, however stable, should be lit at more than 150, arguing that it was perfectly possible to see clearly at that level. Overnight light ceased to be a friend in museums, a helpmate to revelation, but became an enemy to be excluded at all costs. I immediately objected and gave a paper at the next Museum Association’s conference called ‘A Dim View’.
I argued that it’s impossible to appreciate art at 150 lux, let alone
at 50, even for those with excellent sight. Reading, one of the simplest seeing activities, requires 200 lux, seeing to work requires 500, and no surgeon would operate under less than 1,000. I estimated that you need a minimum of 500 lux, in many cases more, to fully appreciate all the subtleties in a painting. This needs to become the minimum light level in any gallery. But light levels, I argued, can rise higher than that, with proper management. The length of exposure to light is as important at the amount of light—the old method of covers on cases successfully solved that problem. But the overriding truth is that very few objects in museums are actually very light sensitive—apart from some fabrics, a few pigments and badly made paper. The majority of man-made objects are very robust and have survived the rough and tumble of the world until they entered the museum’s safe havens. Each object, therefore, needs to be individually assessed so that it can be displayed at its maximum safe light level in order that its full glory can be enjoyed by all, even by those with poor sight themselves. Garry’s blanket approach, I thought, would in time kill off galleries for everyone.
Garry was in the audience and came up to me afterwards, saying he hoped I was wrong. I said I feared I was right, for two reasons: one, a blanket approach was simpler to apply and, second, many curators will like it. Gloom in galleries creates a precious atmosphere around a collection, which will appeal to some curators, even though they would never examine the objects themselves under such poor light conditions. They think this is good enough for the public, even though the public are the real owners of ‘their’ collections. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘All professions are conspiracies against the public,’ and museum curators are no exception. I tried to persuade Garry to rewrite his book, but without success. Sadly, wherever I visit museums around the world, I see my gloomy prediction becoming more and more true.
I would love to live long enough to see the day when light, and above all, natural daylight, the most superb light of all, is welcomed back into museums to illumine all the wonders they contain. And—who knows?—we might even be able to welcome sunlight back. One of the greatest experiences of painting in the world is the Mesdag Panorama in The Hague—a rare survival of a once popular art form. The vast encompassing cloud-, sea- and dune-scape is animated daily by direct sunlight falling around it as the earth turns. Staff there told me that the paint hasn’t changed in over 140 years due the fact that Hendrik Willem Mesdag mixed starch with his pigment—the colours are still as bright as a daisy —but the sand on the mound in the centre on which you stand to view this remarkable painted scene has darkened over time and therefore has had to be replaced with a lighter mixture. I do not know the chemistry of Mesdag’s medium, but it needs analysis, for it could help us create the most magical painting of all, which will remain fresh and brilliant for years to come.
My second battle is ongoing—and, indeed, I am using this book to give it a boost. I have fought and will continue to fight for the future potential of the art of painting until my dying breath. Many of the anecdotes told here, such as those about John Berger and David Bowie, Marcel Duchamp and Nicholas Serota are included here to throw light on that battle. Of even wider significance, public galleries and museums, by preserving and showing people’s achievements in the past, can help to inspire us to create cultural expressions that are profound, personal and lasting, as an antidote to the rising tide of brand marketing that offers little of substance, visually, to anyone.
We have a whole planet to save, and one way we’ll help to do that is by enriching the world we can see in lasting ways. Considering what is lasting is, in itself, challenging, and seems to be against the ephemeral, ever-accelerating spirit of our times, but
this pushes us in the right direction: to create environments that are inspiring and sustainable. Art, in all its manifestations, helps up do this. We need to encourage visual creativity, if only for the fact that living in a city where there is nothing interesting to see is dispiriting or, worse, soul-destroying (if you are fortunate enough to have one).
David suggested the ABC format. Originally it was going to be arranged by themes, like Acquisitions, Buildings, Collections, but I thought arranging it by people’s names would be more entertaining and interesting. As my Latin and drama teacher at school, Walter MacElroy—a Californian communist whose perpetually bemused smile belied the sharpness of his mind and who’d quit America when his name was added to Senator McCarthy’s red list —used to say, ‘The world is divided into people who are interested in people and people who are interested in things.’ I’m a people person despite spending my career caring for objects, but I only did so because they interest people and the ones that interested me the most were made by people for other people, or for gods, which many people thought were people, of a sort, too.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that everything I’ve done and tried to do was inspired by people I’d met, either personally in my own time or people in the past. Even if you’re looking at a work of art from a very different age or culture, what you’re doing, in essence, is meeting someone else, and watching as they show you their thoughts and feelings, magically though by no means always seductively. John Ruskin, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and L. S. Lowry are, in many ways, as alive to me as if I’d met them personally and they gave me ideas about what to do today. Meeting living artists was even more stimulating— unforgettable encounters with the likes of David Hockney, Jean Tinguely and Beryl Cook.
To bring the many people I’ve met to life, I’ve painted little
word portraits of them, as, you might have noticed, I’ve begun to do already. This is, I’m afraid, not exactly politically correct. We’re not supposed to look at superficial appearances, but to judge the person buried underneath. We’re taught from an early age not to stare, and never, ever, to point. But this is what artists do all the time, stare and if not exactly point, point out. While I was in Manchester, the idea was seriously considered, in a fit of premonitory wokery, that all interviews for jobs in the council should be held with the candidate behind a screen, because looking itself is packed with prejudices. I argued so are words and voices— prejudices have to be recognised and overcome, not hidden. Thank goodness, this policy was not adopted. Seeing remained a useful tool.
It is therefore only fair that I attempt a word portrait of myself in the hope that those mentioned in these pages who I have subjected to similar cursory descriptions, and others, might recognise some truth in the face that I have been given and fractionally chosen to present to the world. I am thin (or, at least, was) and of average height with a large round head topped by a mess of dark hair and fronted with rather ordinary features that looked as though they’d been flattened, earning me the nickname of ‘squash-face’ at school. This seemed apt because I often had occasion to be surprised that I have gone through life without being punched in the face, not only because I have invasive, dark eyes but also a tendency to blurt out whatever comes to mind without considering the implications, coupled with my habit of grinning broadly, whatever the circumstances. And, even worse, I habitually erupt into a loud bark that is intended for a laugh— the unfortunate confluence of an irrepressible sense of humour combined with a deep-seated and querulous nervousness. The result of all this was that I sensed many people on meeting me looked at me askance, questioned my stability and, if they were so
minded, especially if they disagreed with me, doubted my sanity. So, it is perhaps to be wondered that I got to where I did.
Art only exists to be seen. I would go further and say that art only exists when it is seen. The Mona Lisa in a store is merely pigment on a plank. This is why public art galleries are so important today; they are one of the few places where the general public can see the art of their times, and the art people made before. A public gallery’s job is to collect and show art that is of lasting quality. But it is a big question, asked repeatedly through these pages, what is the lasting art of today? A gallery curator’s job is to begin that sifting. And a lot of fun can be had along the way. I loved the work from the moment I began.
‘You’re too young to work in a museum.’ This quip by a girl I was chatting to (up would be a better word, but I’ve resolved not to mention girlfriends) in a pub in Leicester, during my first temporary post, stopped me in my tracks. It had never occurred to me that the profession I had just embarked on with such enthusiasm could be a turn-off for anyone. Years later, a colleague of mine at Sheffield City Art Galleries, Mike Diamond, who later become director of the Museums and Galleries of Birmingham, told me that his son Ben’s early infatuation with fire engines had stayed with him throughout his youth, to such an extent that he quit school as soon as he could, without going to university, and joined the fire brigade instead. Mike sighed and said, ‘Well, I won’t tell anyone my son’s a fireman.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ Ben replied, ‘I never tell anyone you work in a museum.’ I was, quite possibly, always too young to work in museums, but whether museums were too old for me, these pages might tell.
My interest in painting began as a child. I was given a box of paints as a birthday present when I was five. My twin brother, Adrian, was too, but didn’t take to it. He later earned eternal fame
by having a moth he’d discovered named after him: Spalding’s Dart. I was hooked on paints, and throughout my childhood that was all I really wanted to do. But two things happened, which overlapped. One thing was that I began to doubt if I really had any talent; my paintings never seemed to take off imaginatively in the way I so admired in a Picasso or Matisse. I felt, perhaps, painting wasn’t a creative language for me. I studied art history and art simultaneously, in a combined four-year course at Nottingham University and Art College, a demonstration in itself of my uncertainty.
The second thing that happened was that when I went to art college conceptualism was already, in 1966, beginning to sweep the board. It struck me as fatuous, pretentious quasiintellectualism from the start. One fellow student Letrasetted the words ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ across the middle of a huge empty canvas the same size as its namesake. What a waste of the world’s resources which, anyone with eyes in their heads knew even in the sixties, were already tragically diminishing. This empty canvas was supposed to be an advance of art. Feebly, instead of resisting, I threw in the towel, abandoned my paints and brushes and disappeared into designing with plastics—a rainbow colour clock for people who didn’t need to know the time, which got on to the shelves of trendy sixties shops (I once saw one for sale in Venice!) and a Magnate’s Mirror Worry Box that unfortunately remained a prototype when the oil crisis struck and plastic prices went through the roof.
Then I went to work in museums, where wonderful paintings could still be found. I soon came to believe that the great art of painting can’t be over, stuck forever in the past, whether I could do it myself or not. I was against the rapidly spreading view that painting was an old-fashioned handcraft that had no place in the age of modern technology. Cartoons, in books and animated films,
which is among the best painting and drawing of our times, disprove that for a start. Painting is the oldest art form that we have, or at least that survives, from the Chauvet Cave in south-eastern France to today. It can show us so much about what we think and feel in our times. So, this book is, in part, a passionate plea for painting’s continuity, and believes in its glorious future. But it’s more than just painting that has to be revived, so does the whole of visual creativity. All art, whatever it’s made of—and art can be made of anything—has to be a visual creation; it can’t just remain an idea, or be simply ‘found’. You have to able to see the art in a work of art. If you can’t see any, the chances are it might not be a work of art, and if it’s only of any value as a work of art, then it might not be worth anything either.
the century, to our fellow humankind. Then, above, the timbers blacken again, and rise up to form a burnt, fragile, skeleton of a tower, on top of which stands a woman cradling a dead man in her arms, a pietà, which, as Tatyana, observed, sums it all up: ‘Caring, carrying and carrying on. Time passing in 2000.’ Tim Stead died that year.
Tim’s home, the Steading in Blainslie, Galashiels, is now, thank goodness, being preserved, with huge public support, by a trust led by the drive and vision of the jeweller and food writer, Nichola Fletcher. Sharmanka is firmly established in Glasgow, run by Sergey Jakovsky, Tatyana’s son, who has used his expertise in theatre lighting to enhance the whole experience. Glasgow, once a socialist stronghold, has taken to its heart the art of Eduard Bersudsky, the latter-day Hieronymus Bosch of Communism and after, until Russia wakes up to realise what she has lost.
Bis for david bowie
I grew up in the great formative era of pop—first Elvis and Billy Fury, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the Stones and the Kinks. There was so much, and the songs came so thick and fast that I thought this was the normal background of youth. But after the Velvet Underground, above all their song ‘Heroin’, I didn’t hear much that really grabbed me, apart from some rap, and I lost interest in the whole shooting match. I once went to a concert given by Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar improviser, in London. Just before he began to play, a mutter went through the audience. The Fab Four were loping in to take their seats in the front row below me. But I forgot about them when the music took over. I closed my eyes. The notes, like jewels exploding in the dark, travelling faster and faster, ceased to be a river passing before me but swivelled round and came full at me. For once, I was in time. I’d never heard anything like it. From then on, pop music for me became the sound of my youth.
Mick Hucknall, who I’d barely heard of, was once invited by my chair, Mike Harrison, to open an exhibition we had on in Manchester. The pop star and I met on the front steps of the City Art Gallery, both going in at the same time. As we walked up together, flames shot out from the roof above us. Men were working up there and, as I found out later, some clumsy workman had dropped a blowtorch. The alarms went. We had to wait. Everyone inside streamed out. The fire engine arrived, plus the press. Cameras flashed. Mick looked at me with amused detachment and asked, ‘Did you arrange this on purpose?’ If I’d been quicker, I’d have got in first—after all he was the lead singer of Simply Red. Then there was the odd serendipity that Imogen Sheeran, my bright, forever-beaming PR officer in Manchester, when she’d
c
‘Look, all the people live in slums here. We’re going to move them all out here,’ indicating, with cupped fists (as if he was lifting clumps of people personally), the hills around Glasgow, ‘into the countryside, in tower blocks.’ When I first came to the city, I asked to be driven round the whole place by a planner to get a real idea of where I was. We drove through Easterhouse, one of the biggest of the schemes. We turned a corner and saw in a barren, open stretch of land between the tower blocks, a gang of youths idly standing around a gaping hole out of which shot a fountain of water twenty metres into the air. ‘Oh God,’ my companion complained, ‘they’ve got through to the main drain again.’
I, in a small way, played my own part in this redevelopment programme. When I was in Sheffield, I’d created a local touring exhibition scheme to send small exhibitions to community centres around the city. Having been brought up in a council estate on the fringes of South London, I was well aware that there is a shadow of cultural deprivation around Britain’s largest conurbations, London most of all. We had thousands of things in our museum stores—why couldn’t we use them to interest people? Our Sheffield service had been a great success, but it was, essentially, a reach-me-down, spoon-feeding service. In Glasgow I wanted to do something different. I wanted to open our stores and invite people in from the community to make exhibitions for themselves.
So I founded the Open Museum. It was got off the ground, brilliantly, by Nat Edwards, who, after a cesura in his education, had become an attendant at the British Museum, and from there developing an interest in the profession as a whole had applied for the job and come highly recommended by a curator there. One of the most memorable community shows, among many, that we put on was organised by a women’s group from Easterhouse, who selected exhibits from our stores showing how men had treated women in the past—tiny Chinese shoes, Myanmar neck rings and
Medieval chastity belts. The group curated and designed the display and talked, enthusiastically, to everyone who came to see it— our work was being done for us, just by opening our doors. Unfortunately, it wasn’t still on when President Chirac came to visit.
His wife wasn’t interested in the housing schemes and wanted to see the Burrell Collection instead. She, and Prince Charles, who attended in honour of the President’s visit, were shown round by Stefan van Raay, the head of art. Three young Cambridge architects, Barry Gasson, Brit Andresen and John Meunier, designed the Burrell in the 1970s, to look like a streamlined greenhouse, or, perhaps more, the classiest modern yacht, in the middle of Pollok Park, with a sweeping lawn in front and trees behind. At the back it had a wall of glass. You walked among the exhibits as if you were in a forest. The royal party had reached that point, and were standing admiring the wood outside, when a lad, having run away from his gang, hid behind a tree, opened his fly and began to pee. He sensed something was wrong, and turned, still peeing, to see a rank of dignitaries gazing at him behind a wall of glass, which he’d just assumed to be a building, a few feet away. He blushed bright red and ran from their silent hilarity. The president’s wife could talk of little else when she arrived at the lunch—the best exhibit of her visit.
I hadn’t really wanted to attend. I told my wife we’d be at a side table in the vast banqueting hall of the City Chambers, and one can have enough of civic dinners. But to my surprise, when we arrived, we were on the top table. Pat Lally, the leader of the council, told me after that he knew Chirac was interested in art and thought we might want to talk about that. The president’s wife was sitting at another table, with Prince Charles. Mine was seated next to the president himself. Gillian Tait was, by profession, a painting conservator, so the chances of a conversation about art was likely, but it took a different turn from the start.
c is for jacques chirac
No sooner had the president sat down, than a waiter came up to him and asked, ‘Are you the vegetarian option?’ His eyebrows shot up his brow even higher than their characteristic upward cock. We were in the middle of the outbreak of mad cow disease, and the beef war between Britain and Europe. ‘Is this normal?’ he asked, in his deep, friendly French accent. Little did he know that that was like waving a red flag to a bull. ‘Normal?’ my wife, Gillian Tait, replied, ‘What do you mean normal? You don’t think it’s normal to be a vegetarian?’ She was the vegetarian option. She had a bee in her bonnet about this subject and didn’t miss her chance not to try to convert the president of France to her opinion. After a bit, Pat Lally diverted the conversation by saying, ‘Can’t we talk about something less controversial, like football?’ When he rose to leave the table, the president raised Gillian’s hand to his lips and said, looking into her eyes, ‘For a woman as attractive as you, I’m almost persuaded to become a vegetarian, but I have to tell you,’ he paused, ‘... I lurve junk food.’ The word ‘lurve’ rolled off his tongue and was long.
Cis for hugh collins
One acquisition I didn’t make might have cost me my life. Ricky Demarco, a private gallery owner, was a famous ebullient figure on the Edinburgh arts scene, especially around the Festival Fringe. He was a confusingly small and simultaneously large man who seemed to bounce more than walk or run. One day he phoned me to see if I would be interested in acquiring for Glasgow Museums a life-size stone carving of Christ by an infamous local murderer, Hugh Collins. The victim they got him for, rumour had it, died of thirty-two stab wounds. Collins had
carved the statue while he was in prison, as part of an arts reform programme. He’d just got out and was living at a safe distance from his home city, across the central belt, forty miles away in Edinburgh. The carving was here, Demarco said, in his gallery. Would I like to see it? I was sufficiently intrigued to say yes.
The grey lump was impressive but horrible at the same time— a remarkable feat for a man who’d never, so I was told, carved anything in his life, apart, perhaps, from human flesh. And the anatomy was, if a bit skew-whiff, passably correct. But what came over most was the fury. The chisel-marks were plain to see: every one a stab wound. But what was also evident at once was the deadness in its creator’s eye—it hadn’t anything in it that could be described in any way as love. The whole sculpture was frigid, cold; it could have been hatched in Nazi Germany, vicious heroics over a hollow heart. The piece reminded me a bit of Hitler’s own drawings which are, for all their technical competence, exceptionally heartless, as if there was something profound missing in his make-up. It is not totally trivial to remark that Hitler, having failed to become an artist, tried to become an artist in life. You can wipe out a figure in a painting with impunity, but not real people. The reverse was supposed to be happening here, but then I suppose it was asking for a miracle for a murderer to be able to bring anything he touched to life.
Collins wanted £15,000 for it, I was told, a grand for every year he’d spent inside. I always have an immediate response to art, but then I like to think about it for a while, at least over a night, preferably over several. The brain receives visual information almost instantaneously and over-all first impressions always tell. This is what art is about: stilling the moment in the heart. If a work of art doesn’t go ‘boom boom’—as the late, redoubtable, curator at the Tate, and ex-vet, David Brown, was fond of saying—it doesn’t even begin. But first impressions can on occasion be wrong,
R is for john ruskin
peering round the canvas to see what you’re doing. Art is a public expression that naturally exists in the public sphere.
Many big names were only too eager to take part, particularly illustrators and cartoonists, who in many ways will come to be viewed as the most genuine, inventive and perspicacious artists of our times, such as Steve Bell, Posy Simmonds and Gerald Scarfe. Scarfe’s sculpture of Chairman Mao as a red chair is a masterpiece of gross, cushioned, scheming, consuming aggression, a profounder work of art than any Claes Oldenburg or Andy Warhol. He told me once that he’d entered as a kid a painting competition and had come second. The winner was an unknown boy called D. Hockney. That’s a fairer judgement of his true prowess and even that might in time be overturned. Quentin Blake was always eager to take part. The problem was that, whenever he appeared, there was always a queue of children, and adults, lining up to get their books by him signed. I asked him, ‘Doesn’t the signing get tiring?’
He replied, ‘It’s not the signing that’s tiring; it’s the smiling.’
I had been elected Master of the Guild through the encouragement and canvassing of the companion, Mark Harvey. A Quaker, he was one of those rare individuals who simply exude goodness. He was an artist and art teacher who loved carving spoons out of wood, of all sizes and for all purposes, and made tiny, monumental sculptures of loving couples out of wooden pegs that weren’t the slightest bit sentimental. I stayed with the Guild for as long as I did due to the good offices of its secretary, Cedric Quayle. His father, like Mark’s, had been a leading figure in the Guild in the past. The Guild was back in the hands of its rightful, purposeful clan. Cedric was one of those rare people who exude quietude. A short man, one wouldn’t expect sensing his unassuming presence that his personal, largely achieved ambition was to climb all the highest mountains in the world. He’d climbed one in Antarctica and told me it was so beautiful looking around the vast white
stillness that he’d burst into tears. I have never been to Antarctica, and probably now won’t get there, but Cedric sharing his vision of it with me remains one of my key motives for doing what I can, however little, to combat global warming or, as I prefer to call it, burning.
I was impatient for results—the Guild was created by Ruskin not to think and contemplate but to act—and Cedric sometimes had to hold me back. I wanted to move on from drawing. Campaigns, like ours, however good, are difficult to sustain and should, I think, have a fixed term. They are battles for awareness, which after they’re won, need to be dropped so we can move on. I wanted to start a campaign for painting, with one specific aim: to reverse the set back in the great art form at the National Gallery in London (see M for Neil MacGregor). Cedric warned me that the idea wouldn’t get accepted by the board of directors. He was right. It didn’t. They wanted to get back to things more Ruskinian. I couldn’t think of anything more Ruskinian than encouraging the art of painting. But life’s too short to try to dance with someone who doesn’t want to dance. I was sad about it but I bid farewell.
Ruskin remains, however, a living presence in my life. I’ve read so much of his writing, and peered so closely at his drawings, that I feel it’s almost as if he were standing at my elbow, a shadowy presence, and a bit at the back, but still young, standing, perfectly straight. I was startled seeing some of his articles of clothing, which survive at his home in Brantwood—he was so thin, elegant and upright. His mother was famous for travelling in a coach across Europe, all the way to Italy, without her back once touching the back of her seat. I imagined her son to have a similar, perpetual rectitude. It was, I thought, a manifestation of his moral vision.
I sometimes imagine what he would think now if he could see what has happened to the world since his time. He was after all the first person to write in effect about the advent of climate
R is for john ruskin
change in his two lectures, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. He would I think in all probability fade away to nothing in horror or, at least, be unable to stand. Nor would he have been able to face the art I loved, of Picasso and everyone after, arguing, as he did, that Darwin couldn’t possibly be right that the beauty of a peacock had evolved solely to interest a peahen. And he gave to his museum in Sheffield, his extraordinary drawing of a single peacock’s breast feather to demonstrate the wider, encompassing wonder of creation. It’s this feeling of wonder that I think we have to recapture, without now denying any scientific discoveries, to motivate us to save our world. Ruskin’s vision of nature is still an inspiration to me. But so too is his moral vision, his rectitude and his insistence on fighting for what he thinks to be right. And his presence at my elbow has given me that backbone.
Sis for niki de saint phalle
I was taken aback. Tears were streaming down her face. Niki de Saint Phalle, even in her sixties and plagued with ill health, was a strikingly beautiful woman—her perpetually natural mouth-pout, wide eyes, arched brows, small nose, set in a perfect vase-like face—and she was very well aware of the fact and had the poise and self-confidence to carry it off. She was still the fashion model who’d appeared on the front cover of Life magazine in 1949, when she was only eighteen. And here she was crying, not that that made her look any less attractive. Not a bit of it.
She’d just been walking round the huge retrospective of her work, taken from Bonn, I’d put on at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. She said:
I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve arranged the show so that every time I’ve stood in the doorway to the next gallery, left one and moved into the next, it’s been a time when I’ve just had to walk out of my life, leave everything behind, when everything got on top of me—I just walked out, and had no idea what I would do next, if anything, and here …
She looked very moved again:
I stood on the threshold and could see everything I did subsequently, things I had no idea I would do, laid out before me, when at the time I had given up everything, was so depressed I thought nothing would happen again.
Then she added, very simply, ‘I’ve relived my life here.’
I had to admit it wasn’t really anything to do with me. I’d simply arranged the works chronologically. Then if in any doubt, I’d put things together that I felt should go together, and I was just lucky that the galleries fitted the sequence of her development. That was all. There was no magic to it. But I think Niki trusted me after that, so much so that I became part of her intimate laughing circuit. Her lungs had been so blown apart by all the chemicals she’d used in making her early sculptures that her doctor advised her to laugh whenever she felt she needed to. She would ring me up at any time of the day or night—it was often in the early hours of the morning after she moved to San Diego—and all I’d hear was her mellow laugh at the end of the line. It was infectious, and I would laugh too. We’d laugh for a few minutes, sometimes as long as five, without saying anything, until she became obviously exhausted, out of breath, and we’d hung up.
I’d been very keen to get some major pieces by her for the Glasgow collection and showing a retrospective of her work was a good way to begin. I regarded her and Jean Tinguely as two of the
most telling artists of our times, and the fact that they’d worked so closely together, been married for a while and even after they split rang each other virtually every day, was all the more interesting since their work couldn’t, almost, be more distinct. It’s hard to imagine any sculpture more opposite to Tinguely’s raw, grinding and twitching mechanics—engines without bonnets—than Niki’s massive, fat, inflated, multicoloured, floating balloon women—all bonnet, or perhaps bosom, so to speak, plus a boot perhaps, or backside, with no engine within. They seemed to be going in opposite directions, which suited them both, I think, very well. But they both shared a similar vision that their art should be in the streets, part of modern life, not stuck away in art galleries—what Tinguely came to call ‘shit art venues’.
Niki upset art dealers and certainly got up the noses of those curators who thought art should be exclusive by producing and selling popular multiples of her work. She did it for a good reason, not just to widen the audience for her work, but also to fund many of her public enterprises. She told me that the scent she made, sold in a Niki snake-twist bottle, helped to pay for her amazing Tarot Garden in Italy. Jean gave a bottle of it to my wife, when we saw him in Lausanne, but said, ‘Don’t put that on here—the bulls will charge out of the fields.’ Niki’s interest in popularity impressed me, as did Jean’s. Any artist of any ambition must, surely, want to be both popular and profound, and Niki and Jean were both in bucketsful.
Niki was extremely generous in the works she gave to the gallery. A fantastic addition, for us, was her Altar of the Dead Cat. This is one of the most harrowing works of art of the second half of the twentieth century. It was one of series—and in my view the most powerful—of ‘Shootings’ (in French, Tirs) she made after she had ‘walked out’ of her first marriage and started to make art seriously. She buried everyday objects and bags of paint in plaster panels
and shot at them with a rifle, wearing, it has to be said, a very glamorous body-hugging pure white suit, which attracted huge media interest. Her fabulous style had a serious intent.
As she said later, ‘I was shooting at myself, society with its injustices. I was shooting at my own violence and the violence of the times. By shooting at my own violence, I no longer had to carry it inside of me like a burden.’ And she had a lot to shoot at: being sexually abused by her father since she was eleven, a bigoted, restrictive Catholic upbringing (she was expelled from convent schools, twice)—a childhood she described as ‘hell’ (both her younger brother and sister committed suicide later in life). Her profound feminism found its feet in these works which, after she’d ‘walked out’ again, took wing with works that celebrated joy. She gave us a wonderful version of her sculpture, The Devil, winged and horned with a multi-phallus-fingered hand reaching out at its groin. These gifts led to more gifts. The collectors Eric and Jean Cass in time gave their whole collection of Niki’s sculptures to Glasgow. That’s the way public galleries need to go—not buying
Artists, such as Michael Craig-Martin, himself a trustee of Tate, Eduardo Paolozzi and John Hoyland, and dealers, including Karsten Schubert and Nicholas Logsdail, signed the letter, showing how closely the art establishment was tied to the trade, and the money it generated.
I had my suspicions, however. The supporters of the letter might have been simply pawns in a more sophisticated game, being played by people who knew exactly how these things worked. I penned a satirical novel about what I thought was really going on behind the scenes in the contemporary art market at the time—called Nothing On—which no one was interested in publishing, and now drifts about somewhere as a dark, irritant speck in the depths of the web.
In Manchester I was intrigued by all I’d heard about the Haçienda nightclub, and decided, on one strange, floating, late evening, to pay it a visit. I was a bit out of place, being older than anyone, but no one noticed; it was too dark, and there was too much smoke. It felt a bit like walking into one of Piranesi’s prison etchings, with levels, pits and ceilings disappearing in front, below and above, as house music pounded in my ears. There were bars seemingly suspended in space serving beer in bottles (without glasses), while people danced and drifted, apparently suspended as well—the whole sensation deeply disturbing to someone like me who basically liked to know where he stood. There wasn’t a direction in the place, no guidance, no texts, not even, I recall, any exit signs or arrows, showing the way anywhere, including out. Everyone there knew where they were, even the way to the loos. I was in a different world.
I wandered down some dark steps and to my surprise came face to face with a huge, blown-up photo, in black and white, of Sir Anthony Blunt, the only image in the whole cavernous jungle. I couldn’t understand it. Who, I thought, here knows who the hell
this man is? There was no explanation, no label, nothing. Then I went down a few more steps, turned a corner and read above a bar its name ‘The Gay Traitor’—the only words I’d seen in the whole shooting match. I told Brian about this experience when I next met him in London. His lips curled. ‘I knew I loathed the North,’ he said in his slow, mannered drawl, ‘and now I know why.’
Sis for paddy japaljarri sims
By far the oldest continuous artistic culture in the world, dating back at least 40,000 years, is that of Australian Aboriginal people. I was determined to put down markers from the start showing how I wanted the new collection of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art to grow. The collection mustn’t be parochial, but had to reach out naturally, as far as possible. I needed something in the collection to make that clear. You couldn’t get further away from damp, cold Glasgow than the arid deserts of Australia, where the indigenous people were now obliged to live, having been driven centuries ago from their fertile homelands on the coastal fringes by invading Brits, many of them transported convicts, a large proportion of these Scots.
I had long thought that traditional Aboriginal art ranked among the greatest contemporary abstract painting in the world, and as for optical effects, at its best, it knocked most of Op Art into a cocked hat. Many museums, like Tate for example, don’t regard Aboriginal art as art at all, let alone as contemporary art, even though it is because it’s being painted now, and they certainly don’t rate it as abstraction, even though it manifestly can be nothing else. They dismiss it, too, because it’s religious and spiritual,
s
as if that excluded Rembrandt, Rouault and Kandinsky from the canon of visual creation! Aboriginal art at its best sings as wonderfully as any art today.
An Aboriginal painting then seemed in so many ways an ideal marker to pin the extent of this new collection’s global reach. The problem was: how to get a really good one? So many of the paintings I’d seen were cynical, slick productions aimed at the tourist market, without any profundity of feeling at all. How could we get the real stuff? I knew I wouldn’t have time to go myself, even though I’d love to have done—one of the few occasions I’ve regretted being a director. And I knew the business of finding and then collecting the real stuff could turn out to be long and arduous. So I sent out a message to all staff asking for a volunteer to go to Australia and collect. I only got one reply, from a young curator just starting off, Tamara Lucas, a quiet-spoken, deceptively softeyed vegetarian. I’d pay for all expenses. We’d deal with the price of the art when we got to that. My condition was that she had to find art that had been created for genuine spiritual purposes, not for tourists or the art trade.
She flew out to Australia and talked to colleagues in museums and representatives of indigenous people in the government. She was dissuaded at every step from going to see the Aboriginal people themselves. Racism was rampant in everything she heard— she was even told that she’d smell these people a hundred miles away, even before the plane landed. If she went, she’d be in and out in a flash. No one stayed for more than a day, quite simply because there was nowhere to stay, and she wouldn’t want to sleep in the open, on the ground. The only thing to do was to buy works from one of the dealers specialising in Aboriginal art, as every foreigner did. She made it clear that this was not what she was there to do, and eventually got her way, obtaining permission to fly to Yuendumu, a remote community northwest of Alice Springs.
She did indeed have to sleep on the ground, and, though a vegetarian, eat kangaroo meat. They kept their tails sticking out of an open fridge in one of the houses the government had built for them that they didn’t use. She told me, by fax—then the only available method of communication—that the mosquitoes were terrible, and her eyes were so swollen that she could hardly see. But she said she absolutely loved the people, above all the women who endlessly laughed and told stories in a language approximating to English, which she’d begun to understand. She went hunting with the women—the men just hung around—chasing kangaroos in cars and driving into them to kill them, and then cooking them and eating them on the spot. One victim had a baby Joey in its pouch, which she snatched to safety before they could kill it and cook it too. Much to their surprise she kept it with her as a pet for all her stay. They probably thought, she thought, that she was a bit touched. But then one day one of the women suddenly looked at her, said she knew who she was, and gave her an Aboriginal name.
All at once, being one of them and having a name, she had a father, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, a tribal leader, who had the major responsibility of keeping alive, literally, the night sky. Paddy expected all his daughters to cook for him and complained about everything Tamara tried to make. On many mornings, she woke to find a man standing patiently waiting for her to wake up, sometimes more than one, occasionally a whole row. They’d walked for many miles, having heard that one of Paddy’s daughters was unmarried, and offering their services, which Tamara had, with difficulty, to refuse, explaining that she was already married, elsewhere, though this wasn’t true. But, among all the activity, she saw very little painting, and she came back eventually with only a few small canvases, good but nothing special. Altogether a fascinating trip for her, but for me very disappointing.
s is for paddy japaljarri sims
But we had a surprise in store. A few weeks after her return, a fax arrived in my office. Tamara’s father, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, told us it was time to do a Night Sky Dreaming, which he conducted every twenty-five years or so. If his daughter came back, he told us, he would give the painting that resulted to our gallery. They had no use for it after it was done—the doing was all—and they wanted the world to learn more about their culture, which they wanted to keep alive.
Dreaming is at the heart of traditional Aboriginal culture. Put rather simply, Aboriginals believe that the world was dreamed—a good modern word for this would be imagined—into existence. They don’t believe in a creator god as such, or at least not one who appears in any form, but in a thinking essence that thought creation into being. The only task that Aboriginals have to do on this earth—eating is just keeping oneself alive—is to keep the world itself alive by redreaming it, reimagining it in their minds. If they don’t do this, and go on doing this, they believe the world and they themselves will die. Their whole culture is, therefore, built around repeating the stories, in dances, poems and paintings, of how the kangaroos, the water holes, the rivers and mountains came to be. And they’ve been doing this for millennia, probably ever since they arrived in Australia from Africa about 40,000 years ago, by far the oldest extant, continuous creative culture in the world. A redreaming of the whole night sky sounded very special, and I sent Tamara back at once.
When she arrived, nothing happened. She hung about for weeks. Her father kept telling her it was about to begin, but then when it didn’t, he told her that it wasn’t time. Time simply didn’t mean the same thing for them. I faxed her asking her to wait as long as necessary, if she could. She did. Then, suddenly, it started—weeks of it. She was utterly exhausted. Paddy and a group of men slept during the day and stayed up all night and she was
expected to do the same—a special privilege. They traipsed miles to different sacred spots across their territory, settled down and when the sun set, sat watching the stars until dawn, telling and chanting stories about them all, and how they had come to be where they are, laughing and enjoying themselves uproariously. Tamara told me she’d never seen so many stars—the night was thick with them, all of so many hues shimmering in the sky. She pointed out shooting stars at first but was greeted with a hush and told to look away, for these were spirits dying and it was unlucky to catch even a glimpse of one.
When they got back to base, the painting, the dreaming began. In the past they used to do this straight onto the ground, with earth and vegetable pigments, and let it sink back into the earth or be blown away after the ceremony was over, just as the Northwest Native Americans used to let their totem poles decay back into the forests, as some still do, returning to the forest growth trunks which they had taken and carved. Now the Aboriginals use huge stretches of canvas, which provide a firmer and easier surface to work on, and they love the brilliant luminosity of modern synthetic paints. Tamara’s father, Paddy, first painted the whole four by three metre area in a bright, almost shocking pink. Tamara was horrified and told him so. He angrily told her to shut up and mind her own business. He was in charge of the painting. She had in the end to admit he was right. The whole canvas was eventually covered with tiny dots, and not a slither of the pink underpaint could be seen.
Tamara took photos, made notes and tape recordings of the proceedings, with commentaries by Paddy and others, all of which are in the Glasgow Museum’s collections. It took about thirty men and women, over three weeks, to complete the painting, laughing and telling stories, and often breaking away to dance, then returning to add, under Paddy’s strict supervision, minute dots to
s is for paddy japaljarri sims
the canvas, as many as the stars in heaven or the souls of people in the past, every touch delicately felt, nothing mechanical, not a centimetre of automatic filling in, everything intended, no pattern making—an extraordinary community abstract creation.
When it arrived, I was taken aback. I had never seen such delicate, precise, painted feeling sustained over such a broad canvas. Glasgow had, by the greatest good fortune, I was sure, been the recipient of one of the profoundest works of art of our times. I searched everywhere for traces of the shocking pink Tamara had told me about but couldn’t find the merest hint. But I was sure that it was this bright underpainting that suffused the whole picture with its extraordinary glow, the restrained rainbow light that Tamara had seen in the totally unpolluted Australian night. This was intended artistry at its finest.
I had seen the stunning telescopic photos of the night sky, taken with natural light, by David Malin at the Australian Astronomical Observatory, and decided to buy some to be displayed alongside this acquisition. These photos were not only beautiful in themselves, but demonstrated how close the actual colours of the starry firmament are to this millennial-old Aboriginal vision. A local journalist, hearing about my acquisition of a few science photos for the Gallery of Modern Art, and wanting to stir up trouble for me—an ongoing game in the Glasgow press—rang the famous art critic Brian Sewell in London to get his opinion. Without bothering to ring me and find out what I’d done and why—even though I knew him well—let alone coming up to look at the photographs and paintings himself (that would have been impossible—it was in the North)—he tossed a remark off the top of his head, much to the delight of the local hack. ‘He’s finally gone mad,’ he said.
Overleaf: Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Night Sky Dreaming, 1992
